Main menu

Post navigation

On Benghazi – Of Course Obama Knew

This morning, former CIA Director David Petraeus testified to something that has been an open secret for months. The CIA knew within minutes that the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was a terrorist act planned in advance. Mr. Petraeus also stated that the CIA report was later altered by another Federal agency.

The Democratic Party’s left-wing held a photo-op yesterday decrying the attacks on U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for her espousal of the Administration line that the Benghazi attacks were the result of an obscure video on YouTube in the immediate aftermath of the event.

There is just a small problem with this line of defense. It is completely false. The Administration has been doing its best to obfuscate and obscure a truthful response on the Benghazi attack. For two weeks afterwards the Secretary of State, the President, and Ms. Rice knowingly lied to the American people. After these lies were exposed, the White House has been playing keepaway with the facts and the witnesses.

How do we know this? First, the New York Times offered a remarkably accurate report of the attack on September 12. A report that surely came from inside sources.

In addition, we have the President and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implying on September 12 that it was the video and not a terrorist attack. The State Department could not move fast enough to produce and air advertisements on Pakistani Television apologizing for the video.

On September 14, the Libyan government had four men in custody according to Al Jazeera. On the 19th, the president of Libya laid out the details to that same network.

On September 24, the President appeared on “The View” and said the investigation was continuing, and did the same on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. The commemorative photo, run by the Washington Post, is especially offensive in light of the lies.

In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly on the 25th, the President stated “If we are serious about these ideals, we must speak honestly about the deeper causes of the crisis” while ignoring the crisis of trust at home as he ignored the real cause for the violence.

The Daily Beast had the administration dead to rights on September 26.

The election came and went and the Administration has continued to do its best to cover up the cover up. But on October 26th, Director Petraeus dropped a curiously worded statement saying that “No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. ” This called into question whether a rescue force was prevented from rushing to Benghazi and absolved the CIA of decision-making authority. This after the Administration did its best to pin blame on the CIA and intelligence community.

Director Petraeus statement this morning is at complete odds with the Administration’s narrative. The CIA did its job on September 11 and reported the facts as they saw them.

Someone else was responsible for editing the report. But Ambassador Rice has a very difficult position. When she was trooped out to mouth the party line to the talk shows a few days after the assault, there was only one person who was authorized to approve her talking points; the President himself.

State reports to the President. The U.N. Ambassador reports to the President. The Director of National Intelligence reports to the President. The Director of the CIA reports to the President. The buck stops there.

The President has been caught in a web of his own lies. It is now up to us to hold him accountable.

The reason Nixon resigned in Watergate was that the media was on him like white on rice, and the Republicans told him to quit or be fired. But here, the Democrats will protect Obama to the bitter end. So will the media. Obama will hang tough, just like Clinton did, and he will never be brought to account.

“The President has been caught in a web of his own lies. It is now up to us to hold him accountable.”
With the election having come and gone, I guess we’ll have to rely on the media to do their job. Good luck with that….

And yet, in this NYT story from SEPT 12 that you cite, we get fighters, apparently interviewed by a NYT correspondent, saying they were inspired by the video.

“Fighters involved in the assault, which was spearheaded by an Islamist brigade formed during last year’s uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, said in interviews during the battle that they were moved to attack the mission by anger over a 14-minute, American-made video that depicted the Prophet Muhammad, Islam’s founder, as a villainous, homosexual and child-molesting buffoon.”

The administration clearly thinks very little of the American public. I don’t know a soul who didn’t reject the video narrative at least 2 days before Amb. Rice appeared on the Sunday talk shows. And if Amb. Rice didn’t have her doubts, and object to parroting the company line, then she isn’t qualified to be Sec. of State, unless her career path is based on blind loyalty, and not integrity.

Indeed, how could Obama not have known? Of course Rice was lying, and not merely relying on a false narrative. Since she holds a cabinet level position involved with diplomacy and national security, she had to have been cc’d the e-mails. However, the real issue is not that she lied, or even that the president told her to lie. The real issue is what they were trying to cover up, and why it was such an explosive revelation that even now they are refusing to come clean.

CNN reported that AQ in Iraq fighters were involved in the attack, after earlier reporting that Stevens was on an ‘AQ hit list’. This lined up with the statement from the president of the Libyan Assembly after the event–that it was a terrorist attack featuring ‘foreigners’. We’ve been through 2 months of BS just to return back to square one. In the meantime the president got reelected.

For two weeks the President consistently blamed the Benghazi deaths on an American video and it’s maker, and not directly on the Islamic jihadist attackers and the governments that enabled them. Worse than telling a lie, the lie he told sided with the attackers. He encouraged the enemy by agreeing with them that a video justified the attack and murder of American diplomats.

How sad that only half of our fellow citizens seem to have recognized this failure of our President.